Minyan, Sophia Goldberg

Art and Art History Honors Projects

Minyan is a full-scale art installation that recreates my memory of the synagogue sanctuary my family attended when I was a child. Salient furniture: a bimah, chairs, and a mechitza have been welded from wire and covered in fabric. These items are arranged in their traditional locations, inviting viewers to enter the “sanctuary” space and walk among the furniture. In place of an ark hangs a handmade tallit. The recreation of this familiar space was part of my effort to understand what Judaism means to me and how my identity as a trans and queer person resides within Jewish space. …

Future Trash, Xinan Ran

Theses and Dissertations

Xinan Ran explores the politically different, yet similar cultural habits that China and the US share under the influence of late-stage capitalism. Through her handmade, speculative products inspired by novelty gadgets, or “Unitaskers,” she examines the heightened prevalence of the contemporary wellness market. The project “Future Trash” encompasses soft sculptures, printed materials, performance, and installation.

Póster De La Conferencia Segundo Congreso Internacional De Iconografía Precolombina

Segundo congreso internacional de iconografía precolombina. Barcelona, 2023. Actas.

Victòria Solanilla, organizadora

17 al 20 de octubre de 2023.

En el Museu de Cultures del Món de Barcelona. Calle Montcada, nº12-14, 08003, Barcelona.

Y en el Institut d’Estudis Catalans. Calle del Carme, nº 47, 08001, Barcelona.

Proyectar El Diseño Precolombino: Experiencias Didácticas, Luz Helena Ballestas Rincón

Segundo congreso internacional de iconografía precolombina. Barcelona, 2023. Actas.

Se presenta el resultado de un Modelo Pedagógico basado en el Diseño Precolombino, el cual ha sido aplicado en diversos escenarios y ambientes de aprendizaje. Mediante la sistematización de la teoría con la práctica del diseño se muestran ejemplos de los métodos de diseño que han resultado eficaces, ya sea en el ámbito universitario o en grupos interesados en el conocimiento de estos bienes patrimoniales, entre los que se encuentran estudiantes y profesores del área artística así como personas convocadas por algunos museos que poseen colecciones precolombinas.

Al experimentar y proponer activando los mecanismos que liberan la creatividad y, a …

Los Bordados Mayas Que Protegen De Enfermedades En El Estado De Yucatán, México, Roberto Campos-Navarro, Leydi Dorantes, Danielle Dupiech Cavaleri

Segundo congreso internacional de iconografía precolombina. Barcelona, 2023. Actas.

Conocemos el rol de los textiles en los rituales y el significado de numerosos símbolos que bordan las artesanas mayas de la Península de Yucatán, no obstante, existen varios motivos de plantas medicinales bordados en los textiles que no fueron analizados. En el mes de septiembre de 2022 dio comienzo una investigación en cooperación con la joven curandera x-meno’ob de Yaxcabá, Leydi Dorantes, que cultiva más de doscientas plantas medicinales mayas en el jardín botánico que creó su abuelo, mismas que usa en rituales y también para curar. Ella nos da a conocer la relación existente entre los elementos de …

Identificación De La División Del Trabajo Entre Los Géneros A Través Del Análisis Iconográfico, Sarah Kauffmann

Segundo congreso internacional de iconografía precolombina. Barcelona, 2023. Actas.

El presente trabajo se enfoca en la metodología para identificar los roles y actividades realizadas por determinado género en la sociedad maya prehispánica. Códigos especiales en la iconografía son utilizados para representar y diferenciar los dos géneros. Varios medios se explorarán como las estelas, dinteles, cerámicas y figurillas. A través de la iconografía se identificará las actividades, vestimenta y postura para interpretar la división del trabajo.

This present study focuses on the methodology for identifying the roles and activities realized by both genders in the pre-Hispanic Mayan society. Special iconographical codes are used to represent and differentiate men and women. …

El Refugio De La Imagen Chamánica En El Mundo Malagana, Sonia Blanco, Catalina Simmonds Caldas

Segundo congreso internacional de iconografía precolombina. Barcelona, 2023. Actas.

La voluntad de elaborar una pieza antropomorfa, es incidir sobre el objeto, haciéndolo actuante. Tratándose del mundo Malagana – sociedad prehispánica colombiana –, que consideró el papel primordial de la mujer, esta imagen femenina y robusta, en cerámica, de pie, portadora de una máscara, como pieza – soporte simbólica contendría en su epidermis y gesto, una narrativa ritual. Desarrollada en un espacio funerario, como ajuar, personificaría los atributos del mono aullador y convocante de los “espíritus (auxiliares) alter-ego”, de los monos ardilla, intervendría de forma ritualista sobre los humedales del pueblo Malagana, aportándoles el equilibrio para la inflorescencia de la …

El Sobredimensionamiento Y Otros Recursos Plásticos Como Representación De La Capacidad Extática–Visionaria En El Arte Chamánico Americano, Ana María Llamazares

Segundo congreso internacional de iconografía precolombina. Barcelona, 2023. Actas.

Este artículo explora uno de los principales rasgos del arte chamánico visionario: el sobredimensionamiento de las figuras o de algunas de sus partes significativas. A través de diversos registros arqueológicos y contemporáneos, se brindan elementos valiosos para interpretar como representaciones explícitas de la capacidad extática o visionaria, ciertas imágenes de arte prehispánico o etnográfico ligadas a tradiciones de prácticas chamánicas americanas, en las que se ha expresado la percepción de la magnificación energética a través de rayos, aureolas o apéndices diversos que expanden el tamaño de las cabezas, manos, pies u otras partes del cuerpo en forma desproporcionada respecto del …

Waiting To Exhale, Abigail H. Ogle

Theses and Dissertations

We breathe as a measure of time, it keeps us alive, and fabricates the pattern of our lives. We are punctuated by “snarls,” “glitches,” or moments of irregularity – of trying to catch one's breath, having it taken away, or gasping for it. It is the punctuation of sighs, huffs, sniffs, scoffs, screams, and deep intakes that appear as glitches in the breathing system.

In our daily rhythm of breathing, the presence of the glitch, defined as potentiality, can create space for something unexpected or new to arise. Using the wind from fans and approximately 1,260 square feet of silk, …

A Fragile [In] Tension, Jose Homero Gutierrez, Jose Homero Gutierrez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The exhibition, a FRAGILE [In] TENSION, is a compilation of 6 sculptural installation works—the result of two and a half years of work in the ceramics workshop— combining various ceramic procedures, incorporating crochet techniques, and repurposed materials. Each of the materials represents specific memories of the past linked to a place of origin and people deeply attached to me, representing complementary feelings. Ceramic objects were created on the potter's wheel and subsequently joined, modified, intervened, and added to their corresponding installations following a series of self-directed design rules. The sculptures are an emotional, psychological, and physical response to the past …

Winding Down River Road, Gillian Harper

LSU Master's Theses

As a mechanism to explore my temporary home in Louisiana, Winding Down River Road is a collection of artworks that integrates natural materials collected from landscapes in southern Louisiana with steel and petroleum-based products. My interest in researching environmental issues, ecology, and industry has shaped my vehicles for observation and how I generate data. Through a variety of methodologies, I am considering how climate change is forcing many of us to re-contextualize how our home can be affected by the very industries we rely on. Personal engagement with residents living in the dystopian atmosphere of southern Louisiana’s industrial corridor and …

Entities: A Field Of Imaginary Games, Thrasyvoulos Ioannis Kalaitzidis

LSU Master's Theses

With this body of work, I am looking for visual symbols that help communicate unuttered meanings through storytelling and stimulate an affectual response to the viewer. This exploration is presented in two different forms: a surreal sculptural installation and a board game. The installation consists of large-scale sculptures made from light and soft materials (polyurethane foam, plastic waste, paper) that are available to move inside the gallery, while the board game is presented as a set of 3D prints with instructions on how the participants can play it. The materials used in the installation suggest a way to transform waste …

Disorientations, Noah Greene-Lowe

MFA in Visual Art

The materials that make up the ordinary and mundane in the United States also reinforce and normalize a white spatial imaginary. Conventions of mapping, imaging of land and landscape, and elements of the built environment continue to orient us in a logic of space as property. In my sculptural work, I employ strategies of disorientation and creative repair, or reconstruction, to unsettle the spatial practices of whiteness and structures of power embedded in the mundane, the familiar, and the domestic. I consider the planned cohousing community where I grew up as an influence on my work, and my whiteness. By …

Nest, Camillia Elci

Masters Theses, 2020-current

The major themes in this body of work are time and layers. These themes are linked by the materiality of the work. Intentional destruction and recreation, perpetually. The work is constantly being made, destroyed, and remade. It is always partly past and partly future. Nest is a self portrait displaying objects acquired and made over the past several years.

Mama, Hannah Scott

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

“By writing herself, woman will return to the body which has been more than confiscated from her, which has been turned into the uncanny stranger on display” (Cixous, 1975). Through a depth of research into feminist perspectives on motherhood, I have created an art installation titled, "Mama". From my research, I have found many artists who make work about their experiences in raising children, women’s work and labor, and the trauma of giving birth. Louis Bourgeois, Natalie Loveless, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Mary Kelly, and Jenny Saville are a handful of artists whose work on motherhood has greatly inspired me to …

Line As Site And Material, Analise Minjarez

Art Theses and Dissertations

This paper recounts my artistic practice over the last three years. I will describe the places, artists, artworks, and processes that have been meaningful to me in this time as I pursued my MFA and worked to understand my relationship to the living world. In the thesis Line as Site and Material, I respond to materiality and site through installation, sculpture, drawing, and video. I work with clay harvested from my hometown of El Paso, TX to connect to the personal histories of the borderlands and geological time. In the Second River Series, I walk in the empty riverbed of …

Fashioning The Flapper: Clothing As A Catalyst For Social Change In 1920s America, Julia Wolffe

Honors Program Theses

Fashion has been a catalyst for social change throughout human history. Fashion in 1920s America in particular reflects society's rapidly evolving attitudes towards gender and race. Beginning with how corsetry heavily restricted women for nearly four hundred years up until the twentieth century, this thesis explores how clothing has acted as a tool for societal progression following World War I and Women's Suffrage and during the Jazz Age and The Harlem Renaissance. Specifically, this thesis examines how the influence of jazz music and dance that originated from Black American communities led to the creation of the flapper evening dress. The …

Mother Water, Crystal J. Hammerschmidt

Master's Theses or Doctor of Nursing Practice

Water is life. That which nurtures, sustains and nourishes. My mother is truly my water. The one who gave me life and has supported and nurtured me though and through. While wading through the challenges and adversity of graduate school, she has been there every step of the way; and while I struggled to find what I was trying to say, I was quietly toiling over thoughts of my own fertility, maternal instincts and desire to nurture something and I began to acknowledge the mortality of my own mother.

The materials and images I combine are deeply connected to my …

Spectrum Of Shit, Hannah Hiaasen

Theses and Dissertations

Contending with the loss of a parent to a mass shooting in their workplace, a newsroom, I find myself suspended in time, in an office. Post-its, fans, button-ups, snow globes, clipboards, reporters notebooks, scrap paper, jot downs, keyboards hold me up. I crave the comfort of repetitive cumulative hand work. Quilting, weaving, and cutting away help me breathe, haptically process and memorialize these grieving objects, this grieving person. Weed-wacking towards intimacy, my work employs a range of materials to mourn the mundanity of a workday, fantasize transformative justice, and steward embodied grief to the surface. My only speed is slow-- …

Until Its Calmness Can Claim You, Gabrielle Mchugh

Theses and Dissertations

This is an invitation to pause //

This is an externalization of my inner landscape, a highlight of what I value in my everyday and what comprises my lexicon of a sacred space. The following is a journey of nets, quiet, the sacred, space, and the in-between; where I share research and questions that are the foundation for my thesis work, Until Its calmness can claim you.

// This is an invitation to find moments of quiet in the noise

Defiantly Childlike: Using Aesthetic Resistance To Heal, Sarah K. Reagan

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines an alternative processing mechanism surrounding the act of healing after traumatic experiences in life. Using a methodology of iterative patterning and tool-pathing, a collection of inflatable garments and wooden mannequins analyzes defense mechanisms learned in early childhood development. This work highlights an essential body of recent scholarship that takes cuteification seriously to restore a childlike approach to mastering fear. This paper will review the definitions of cuteness and childlike humor and then describe how visual culture has implemented these components to subvert established power.

Damned Ol' Dirt, Molly Morningglory

All Theses

damned ol’ dirt centers mindfulness and embodiment practices to foster relationships with the self, each other, and the land. These relationships intend to collectively imagine and then build an emotionally and environmentally sustainable and joyful future. My practice foregrounds clay with digital video, photography, and fabric dyeing, recording the imprint of performance. I use my hereditary understanding of clay and fibers, a trained attunement to the natural world, and my background of performance in craft (via demonstration of tactile techniques) to transfer knowledge and skill to the viewer. Through the creation of tableaus and documents of rituals based in materiality, …

The Mvohc Project, Brooke Day

All Theses

ABSTRACT

A Mvohc is a Morphic Vessel of Human Consciousness. The Mvohc Project traverses' theories of spatial identity in tandem with creative world-building as a method for examining the intricacies of the human condition and reimagining reality. My creations are designed to promote autonomy over the contemporary world's ever-evolving societal complexities to empower individuals, foster imagination and communication, and create space for positive change. This body of work incorporates fleshy biomorphic sculptures inspired by science fiction, deep-sea marine life, and the human body. The abject creatures are partnered with constructed audio-scapes that encompass the frenzy of an overarching internal monologue, …

The Art Of Heritage And Mortality, Barbara Johanna Mileto

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Through my art I explore the formation of cultural and personal identity addressing the importance of heritage, ancestors, and religion in Latin-American culture, while I develop my unique deities and spiritual space, creating my own iconography. The pieces are strongly autobiographical, using my family members, and frequently lived experience as a subject. Furthermore, I am drawn to the circle of life and productive failures - beginnings, deaths, and transitions. - My work integrates two-dimensional and three-dimensional mediums, ranging from photography and printmaking to assemblage and textiles, video and digital.

Body/Mind:Matter, Mary Ellen Ratcliff

LSU Master's Theses

Body/Mind:Matter presents the unfiltered experiences of living in a period of momentous instability. Three life-sized figurative sculptures stage my emotional journey towards mindfulness as a direct response to the pandemic and my growing concern for our collective future. A winding network of crocheted yarns and growing vines interweave the troubled figures to signify our complex dependencies upon one another and our environment.

The condition of the encumbered bodies is a result of the worried mind. Revitalized matter proposes reconciliation by introducing a sense of hope; decaying surfaces reveal new life; fused wires hold up under immense pressure; and soft woven …

And All The Things That Grew On The Ground, Sarah E. Phillips

Masters Theses, 2020-current

This is a document archiving and describing my work for the years 2019-2021 as part of the completion requirements for the Master of Fine Arts degree. As a whole, this work investigates the paradox and negotiations of access to the self, the history, and to the landscape you occupy. It asks questions about authorship, valuing, sacred and sacrament, but retains the gravitation, umbilical tie to memoir and narrative. Ritual, habit, and transformational cleansing are recurring themes in the work. Body, breath-- access to the invisible. Preservation of the uncertain. Fragility carries weight, and importance, destruction and negotiation as vessels of …

A(M(End)Ing))) Expectations, Renee Holliday

Graduate Theses

This thesis statement explores how my intersectional identity as an artist and mother with a working-class background are intertwined, and how that upbringing has influenced each of these roles and my actions and interactions with those around me. The first part of this thesis A(m(end)ing))) Expectations serves to highlight the diverse experiences that helped form the basis of my identity while also exposing many of the unhealthy societal and familial expectations that are often placed upon women. The exhibition YES/AND is the culminating work of how these varied identities, combined with contemporary themes of feminism, affects my artistic decisions and …

Unmentionables, Madeleine F. Grotewiel

Graduate School of Art Theses

This text explores the capacity for shamed bodily materiality to narrate the complexity of healing from sexual trauma while rape culture persists. Because rape is discussed so little in public, sexual healing often takes place under a meaty layer of shame, placed on the survivor’s body. Their truth is frequently interpreted as too much/gross/ugly/unspeakable for the public, and it is simultaneously not enough to be discussed/accepted/pursued as an actual issue. This uncomfortable teeter-totter comes from the patriarchal boundaries drawn between what is privately or publicly acceptable. There are plenty of depictions of sexual violence in popular culture and the canon …

Coping With Burdens, Jennifer Rose Wolken

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

How to carry and cope with burdensome circumstances beyond my control is the main theme I am currently exploring in my artistic practice. I create art objects and experiences that can elicit an empathetic connection to the realities of living with burdens like grief and chronic illness, or help you to process your own relationship to a wide variety of burdens. Individual pieces explore aspects of how I or close family members cope. My practice is multi-disciplinary and the forms focus on reinterpretation of the book as a sculptural art object or artists’ book. The processes I use are overwhelmingly …

Ties That Bind Us, Christine M. Orr, Christine M. Orr

Theses and Dissertations

when objects converge in a space

they start a dialogue of their lives

lives that become entangled with your life

your memory

objects are the narrators of memory

a stain, a chip, a tear

materials embed meaning and metaphor within the process of creating

woven cloth, throwing lines, squeezed and pressed coils

all become remnants of the hand

as I make, play, and collect materials and objects

questions are brought forward

How do these components talk to one other?

What are they saying?

How do I listen?

knowledge is generated in the transformation of material through the process of

making …